“You write about loneliness too much.”

Someone says to me “You write about loneliness too much.” 

And I think there is a sense in which this is true and a sense in which it is not true.

It is true in the sense that there is too much loneliness in my life, and that I don’t want to keep being in this place and keep writing about it. 

image

But it’s not true in the sense that one shouldn’t write openly and honestly about loneliness and isolation. I don’t write about it because I think my loneliness is special or unique. On the contrary, I believe that loneliness is a kind of epidemic. I talk to people all the time who are missing vital kinds of connection and closeness in their lives. And I don’t think that we as a culture do ourselves any favors by treating this as embarrassing or unseemly, something to brush under the carpet. I think we need to talk about these things more.

Writing about these things is, for me, a way of trying to stay human. I sense my heart wanting to shut down, to just stop holding out hope and stop wanting anything. I seek out art that cracks me open, serving as the axe for the frozen sea within me. It is better to ache and yearn than to let things freeze over. 

But writing is also a way of breaking the ice. My loneliness is a part of who I am as surely as my partnership with another person would be part of who I am. It changes you. Absence is a presence, it becomes a weight you carry around. I am not who I would be if things were different, and I’m not quite who I will be if someday they are. For now these parts of me that yearn to intertwine with someone else and become something with another that they cannot grow into on their own have nowhere to go, except maybe on to the page. This is not their true purpose but it is a way of trying to find some meaning in them in the meantime. 

A friend was on her way to a first date of sorts yesterday and we had this exchange:

image
image

Her reluctance is my reluctance, her fears are my fears. People are so often disappointing. Disappointments pile up, and you realize again and again that this person or that person doesn’t crack you open from the inside, that you can’t really connect with them, that you are just playing a role with them and that they can’t break down your isolation. And you know you’d rather be alone than be with someone just to be with someone.

image

But every once in a while you meet someone, or you get to know someone you met a long time ago, and something clicks, and being with a person, which so often feels like a kind of performance because you feel like they’re performing and you don’t know how to be real with someone who doesn’t seem real, suddenly feels natural again, or at least you start to understand that it might feel natural again, and to know that the years of loneliness can fall away, if it’s right.

One time, my friend Masha had this exchange with her mother:

“I want out but only because I want in and there is no in with him.”
“There is no in with anyone anymore. Nobody wants in with anybody.”
“So what am I am going to do?”
“Nothing. You can’t do anything. That is your problem. There is no answer for this. When are you going to learn that there are just some things you will never understand? One day it will just work and you won’t have to do anything other than what you need to do.”

“One day it will just work and you won’t have to do anything other than what you need to do.” I love that. And I think about that Daft Punk song which is about dancing but is of course not really about dancing…

…and how every once in a while you meet someone and it feels right, and so you know that those people exist. It’s just that they’re so rare, and sometimes you see them as a chance and they don’t see you as a chance. 

And then what can you do but keep looking, and in the meantime, throughout all those long lonely months and years, keep taking a fucking axe to that frozen sea inside you?

My friend texted me this morning. She said her first date went really well.